Occasionally your existing sales team may hit a plateau, perhaps hindered by time restraints verses workload. If the result is a limitation on your business’ growth, additional staff training is not likely to help. Sometimes adding additional sales staff is the best strategy for growing your business. 

Even if your company currently has no openings, it is still advisable to make sales recruiting an ongoing effort. Of course, this can be a difficult, time consuming task, but given that turnover among existing representatives is always a potential threat, making continuous recruitment of sales talent a priority will provide your company with long-term benefits. 

What to Look For

There is no universal road map to sales recruitment. How to proceed will be based on your company’s size, products, business model, sales objectives and job requirements. Some companies have a few large transactions that generate most of their revenue. Others sign numerous deals generating smaller returns per-transaction. The size, type and complexity of these transactions will define the type of sales personnel needed.

Nonetheless, the most important general qualities to look for when sales recruiting continue to be good follow up, responsiveness, problem solving ability, initiative and creativity, and a knack for decreasing costs for the customer.

Customer Relations

In planning a sales recruitment program, it is important to determine whether salespeople will handle existing accounts, new accounts or a combination of both. If your sales representatives will be primarily focused on new accounts and new business, look for people who are highly motivated “rain makers.”

For sales representatives who will handle and grow existing accounts, if the relationship is dependent on the salesperson, your sales recruiting needs to attract more skilled and tenured salespeople. On the other hand, if your customers do business with you based on a relationship with the entire organization, sales personnel should possess strong customer support skills; and if the relationship is based purely on price, your sales recruiting should target high-energy, transactional salespeople with strong closing skills.

If your accounts are large and your products complex, you’ll need the most difficult salespeople to find and attract—tenured, experienced representatives with a strong history of successful selling. You may need to offer them a higher rate of compensation, but regardless, keep in mind that the most important factor in sales recruiting is analyzing each candidates’ past performance.

Where to Recruit

When you conduct sales recruiting, leave no stone unturned. Your options include craigslist, web recruiting sites, sales recruitment agencies, trade shows, YouTube, LinkedIn, associations, conferences, friends, vendors, business networks and employee referrals.

In other words, you should not depend on only one source to generate prospects when sales recruiting. Though you may be hesitant to use recruitment sites due to cost, if you hold them accountable for the success and tenure of candidates, they can be a useful time-saving tool. They can also help by creating job profiles, screening candidates and assisting with interviews.

The overall lesson is to make sure your sales recruiting relies on several sources and maintains an ongoing pool of outstanding candidates.